Why SourceForge Lost

Post by loevborg » Fri, Jul 08, 2011, 10:27 AM UTC

duskwuff wrote: post #16

RossDM wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub UI is significantly better. It just works. Visiting SourceForge feels like going to RapidShare, with all sorts of ads vying for your attention. Each project has numerous sections which may or may not have been filled out by the owner. Heaven forbid that they used the mailing list feature.

> Heaven forbid that they used the mailing list feature. Or the bug tracker. Ulch!

Or the mailing list archive software they use, which must be the worst of a bunch of very bad ones. It seems incredible that there is no halfway decent way to view mailing list archives (mailman's html pages don't count).

Post by scott_s » Fri, Jul 08, 2011, 2:09 PM UTC

evilduck wrote: post #38

astrodust wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that Github's CSS is better, or their graphics are better, but that their design is better, and design encompasses everything, top to bottom. Most things on Github feel effortless, and even the tricky things are far from frustrating. This is evidence that they care, and that care shows in that the graphics and CSS are very well done. Good design doesn't start with appearance, it ends with it.

In Startups Open Sourced , Tom Preston-Warner is interviewed and says to design every detail of every page of a project before touching any code. While graphic design and technical design are very intertwined, I think in Github's case the graphic design came first, or was at least equally weighted. I don't know how SourceForge came to be, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out the backend was designed before the fro…

This is true to a fault: for a while many people asked to be able to change the code font, or at least for it to respect browser defaults. They resisted because that went against what the designer thought was best - which I think is a case of form trumping function.

Re: Why SourceForge Lost

Re: Why SourceForge Lost